


what your name means in a whisper

by hitlikehammers



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bucky Barnes Has Issues, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Captain America: Civil War Spoilers, Emotional Sex, M/M, Possessive Behavior, Reunions, Your pal; your buddy; your Bucky, mentions of psychological torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-16
Updated: 2015-08-16
Packaged: 2018-04-14 23:06:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4583598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hitlikehammers/pseuds/hitlikehammers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <b>SPOILERS FOR CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR</b>
</p><p> </p><p>“Tell me.”</p><p>Steve stares for a few moments: long, thrashing things that pulse with his blood, that tease the sweat-weighed lengths of his lashes as he looks hazy-eyed above him into the face he never thought to see again—never dared to pray would look back at him and <i>know</i>.</p><p>“Tell me you’re mine.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	what your name means in a whisper

**Author's Note:**

> _Civil War_ trailer news travels fast.
> 
> You know what that means.
> 
> Unbeta'd and spur-of-the-moment. So there's also that.

“Tell me.”

Steve stares for a few moments: long, thrashing things that pulse with his blood, that tease the sweat-weighed lengths of his lashes as he looks hazy-eyed above him into the face he never thought to see again—never dared to pray would look back at him and _know_.

“Tell me you’re mine.”

Steve’s panting too hard for words as Bucky rocks into him, as Bucky leans over him so close his own heaving breath draws shivers where it catches on Steve shimmering skin.

“Please,” he begs, even as its mercy on Steve’s tongue; “ _please_ , I—”

“Yours,” Steve forces out, because he sees the need in those eyes; those eyes he needs in turn. He reaches trembling hands and frames Bucky’s face, clutches blindly and relishes the pulse at Bucky’s jam: holds too tightly, has to bruise but Bucky’s eyes are so big, Bucky’s eyes are almost wide enough to fit the span of his still-unfathomable soul.

After _everything_.

“I was yours, I am yours,” Steve gasps, strained with the way his body clenches around what it’s been missing, the way he burns for the way that heartbreak stitches itself in the dark. “I will be yours until there is nothing, until after I’m dust. I’ll be yours.”

There’s a shift in Bucky’s gaze, then: a burst of flame, of fever that undoes something primal, that presses him into Steve with a fervor, with a nameless ache that reminds Steve that this is real, because he’s never felt it before, and he believes that revelation does not live in dreams.

He has to believe this.

He believes this.

“Yours, yours, yours, Bucky,” he pants, and the air is scarce but it tastes of them. “I’m _yours_.”

“Stevie,” Bucky breathes, his face tense against tears; “my _Stevie_.”

And that’s where Steve breaks, where he falls into light and sweet release that’s made of the body above him, inside him: that’s where Steve finds completion and the promise of the now.

Bucky’s weight is heavy on his chest: the heaviest weight Steve’s ever known, and the most welcome he can fathom.

“Buck,” he breathes, and he grants himself a moment just to breathe, shallow and burdened and blessed and _right_ , so that his ribs can eke out the pump of Bucky’s heart. And he’s granted the breaths, the time to let it sink in and saturate his being: he’s given the silence, the closeness; the breaths in return.

He’s still in awe of it, he’s still floating in what it means to marvel before what it means to mourn what came before when Bucky lifts up, unmatched arms bracing him at Steve’s sides so he can stare down, can ask more question than Steve can stand with the storm in his eyes before he manages just one:

“Yours?”

Steve’s lungs stutter; Steve’s mouth is dry.

“Please,” Bucky rasps, lashes glinting with what this means, with what this is, for him; Steve can’t swallow. Steve can’t breathe around the pummel of his heart.

“Please say you are, still,” Bucky whispers, and reaches a single, shiny fingertip to trace Steve’s jaw; it’s not until he pulls back and Steve catches the shift in the reflection of the light that he sees that Bucky’s wipe tears from his own cheek.

Steve is in the business of failing his friend, his heart, his world. It is the only thing Steve thinks he’s sure of, more days than not.

It kills him.

But Bucky: Bucky _is_ Bucky, here and now and _his_ , if his words are reading true inside Steve’s mind, against Steve’s soul. Bucky is _Bucky_ , and he never lets Steve flounder, won’t stand to watch him drown.

“That’s how they,” Bucky whispers, settles harsh against Steve’s body again: a puppet with cut strings, no finesse, and that kills Steve, for the source of it; that lights Steve from inside, for what it means to see this man move free, trust full.

Here. With _him_.

“In the early days,” Bucky barely breathes. “Just after,” and his voice catches, and Steve doesn’t miss the way he shifts just so to place Steve’s heart beneath his ear.

“ _Your Steve_ ,” Bucky whispers to the skin, in a voice that it’s quite his. “ _Your Steve needs you._ ”

That’s what they said, Steve realizes suddenly. In the early days, that’s what they said.

The heart beneath Bucky’s ear takes to raging just a little harder. 

“They had this,” Bucky swallows; “doctor. He had,” and Bucky brings his hands together to play with the circumference of his finger for just a moment before he shakes his head and leans his weight on Steve again.

“I don’t know,” he confesses. “I don’t know how he did it, how he…”

Bucky’s breath is rapid, now, and Steve raises a hand to card through Bucky’s tangled hair while Bucky presses tighter into Steve’s chest and Steve doesn’t know which helps, really, just that Bucky’s breath begins to slow.

“One minute, I couldn’t breathe,” Bucky rasps, still breathless even in the now. “They’d be yelling about shit I couldn’t make out over how fast,” Steve watches as he bits his lip to bleeding, as he brings Steve’s hand to the center of his own chest to speak the words he can’t.

“But then he’d be there,” Bucky exhales; “and it’d all fade, somehow.”

Steve’s read about the man, the doctor, in the S.H.I.E.L.D. files. Steve wants to burn the world, wants to rip apart time and space and make everyone suffer for what they did, for what they broke, for what they—

“He tried to convince me nothing was wrong,” Bucky’s speaking, and so Steve pushes the hate, the bloodlust aside. “Tried to take my mind away from you but that never worked, and he was smart. The doctor.”

Bucky takes a moment, another, just to breathe. It sounds like a struggle.

It breaks Steve’s heart all over again.

“So he used it to his advantage. Knew you had to mean something big if he couldn’t distract me from you,” Bucky nuzzles into him, made entirely of need. “Saw it’d take more than even he had in him to push the thought of you away.”

He kisses Steve’s chest and breathes against his pulse and Steve wonders how the world can be in ruins just as it’s lying here, giving him life.

“So they warped my mind, I guess,” Bucky finally says, head bowned against Steve’s sternum: “where they couldn’t bend my heart.”

Steve can’t help, can’t stop the gasp that escapes him. The moan of agony that tears out from his bones.

“ _Your Steve’s in danger. Your Steve is in the line of fire. Your Steve._ ”

Steve’s blood is made of acid, his heart is a vise: it was love. They used love.

They used _them_.

Steve can’t fucking see straight, not for that.

“Before the tech caught up, that was the only thing they had,” Bucky sums up, sandpaper voice tearing at Steve from the inside, and from out; “the only way they _could_.” 

Steve feels the smirk, the hateful, venom curve of lips against his skin.

“ _The target means to take him. The target means to snuff the very life out from your Steve. What will you do?_ ” Bucky huffs a sound; not a laugh, but not a sob. “It was never a fucking question. For all that I couldn’t think, I heard that. I _knew_ that.”

And Steve has often wondered, often wished for, often prayed to turn back time and make a deal, make a trade: and he sees, now, that this is all that would have been needed, no matter which of them they stole.

Steve wouldn’t have had to think twice.

“In the end, the chemicals and the wipes and the things they did,” Bucky doesn’t make a sound, which makes the hiss of pain from Steve at just the mention, just the _thought_ all the more violent; all the more pronounced. “The doctor died, they needed a way to…open me to suggestion, I guess. But by then, it was damn near Pavlovian. _Shape the century. Change the world. Usher the golden age._ ” 

Bucky shakes his head, and leans all the less for exhaustion, all the more for loss as he whispers:

“It was all your name, whether they said it or not.”

Steve doesn’t try to stop his tears escaping. Steve doesn’t try to ignore the wetness under Bucky’s face against his skin.

“I had to protect you,” Bucky murmurs, confession meant for a priest but received by the fallen. “I had to keep my _Steve_.”

And maybe it’s all the better, because Steve knows this blessing, this mortal sin. Steve knows it like the back of his hand; the beat of his blood.

“Buck…”

“I remember, then,” Bucky’s voice is thinner, now, is pleading; “I remember saying,” he drags lips through his own tears on Steve’s flesh, back and forth. “I remember hearing you say back—”

“Mine,” Steve wrenches out, a truth he’d hope to know again above all other things. “You are mine,” and he reaches, he lifts Bucky’s chin, red-rimmed eyes meeting across a distance made of the breath they’re both choking out.

“My Bucky,” Steve whispers, strokes his face with the utmost tenderness, with a love his hands can’t hold. “My Bucky, _always_.”

And Bucky barely moves, Bucky barely breathes; Bucky’s eyes leak sorrow and all the wrong that’s left so that it’s purged, so that maybe he can help hold the love that’s there, that bleeds and screams and soars.

“Always,” he echoes, whispers like an oath, a vow.

“Forever,” Steve seals it; “Only mine.”

And Bucky goes boneless against him again, but this time it’s not desperate, not torn and stuck and bled, but it’s full of breath, light as air, and nothing is gone, nothing is saved, nothing is solved, not really.

But Bucky whispers:

“Okay.” And he kisses the beat of Steve’s heart through the skin, and maybe that’s all the need really. Steve’s Bucky. Bucky’s Steve.

“Okay.”

**Author's Note:**

> [Tumblr](http://hitlikehammers.tumblr.com/post/126791984187/fic-what-your-name-means-in-a-whisper-11).


End file.
